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You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Ceased
Memory
Except
Exist
Memories
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More quotes by John Steinbeck

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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.
John Steinbeck
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I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck
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The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck
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Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.
John Steinbeck
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There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
John Steinbeck
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Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.
John Steinbeck
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Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?
John Steinbeck
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Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.
John Steinbeck
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To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
John Steinbeck
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How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
John Steinbeck
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I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.
John Steinbeck
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Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.
John Steinbeck
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All great and precious things are lonely.
John Steinbeck
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
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I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.
John Steinbeck
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Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
John Steinbeck
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This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
John Steinbeck
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I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
John Steinbeck
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A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.
John Steinbeck
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A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.
John Steinbeck